Gerhard Richter: Without Color
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Gerhard Richter: Without Color Details
Without Color presents an important group of paintings from Gerhard Richter's oeuvre: works without color--something upon which the painter ordinarily relies a great deal. The (non-) colors, black, white and gray have always played an important role in Richter's art. Spanning four decades, from the early 1960s to the present, the broad, fascinating spectrum of these colorless paintings ranges from representational works based on black-and-white photographs, to entirely abstract paintings. Richter needs no more than a palette of grays to create impressive works in the traditional genres of history painting, portraiture, landscape and still life. He explores the fundamental aspects of painting in images composed of streaks of gray, overpainting and monochromatic gray color fields. The outcome is a cross-section that incorporates everything painting can mean today--while focusing on the innermost essence of painting through the paradoxical renunciation of color.
Reviews
Richter has tried his hand in all genres,he is not afraid of failure, or merely constructing "dead" spaces, although nothing in art is ever "dead", it always has your attention; and there is a meaning there a content in not having an external focus, one that is readable to his viewers, this position assumes that art is something else, like the interesting quote of Adorno on philosophy that the reason it lives on is that the moment to realize it has passed, so to one can say of art. The use of monochromatic colours,one-dimensional is quite subtle exposition of this position, it means the artist is reduced, marginalized,flattened like its materials itself having a voice takened away like a voice that is "harsh" from over use,representation is nothing now,it is merely "work" transformation of materials, but here one finds one's voice,like one having in music perfect pitch, so to having a vision inside you for colour, and form,never goes away, and we know it when viewing art; art perhaps it now is only a caricature of what it once was.The shelf life of art is morphed eclipsed by its own processes. Many claim that Richter is not even a painter,well perhaps not as history would have one, was Pollock a painter? the squigee series of Richter is ample proof of allowing your materials to take over,the paint is arbitrary ,yet it is allowed to speak to have its own violence un-referenced;yet there is both some reserve here, not allowing a subjectivity into the proceedings yet allowing the paint to speak for itself through a shape, a form;although you still cannot see where the autonomous process ends and Richter begins,One Colour allows much to happen, you reduce one dimension only to make others more intense; his work still allows one to lead you into an area for contemplation even if it is only to take the pulse of art, that it has been reduced to whatever you see it is, similarly in the other arts things, objects, icons, materials being manipulated,rendered,placed, re-placed,surrounding it with a context already exisiting in the real world,at least allows the artist a means to create.Art may be simply setting a stage, a place for something to happen, or merely seeing what has already happened, as with the work of natural photographers,who play with the complexity of light minimally, yet I am drawn more to thses phots more than paintings. Perhaps because painting there are more decisions to make, ones burdened with the bagage of the museum. Richter has worked through this paradigm himself.He has done work simply for himself not others, as his early photographs